Innovation & Growth

Industry Challenges

Sustained profitable growth is the goal of nearly every company—but the search for growth has never been more difficult. Markets are increasingly saturated, and pricing flexibility is restrained by low-cost challengers. In order to drive this growth, companies must innovate.

Only half of all companies are satisfied with their innovation activities. The main obstacles to generating necessary growth through innovation are risk aversion, long development times, and selecting the right ideas to commercialize.

BCG Competencies

BCG has extensive experience helping companies increase the impact of their innovation activities. By combining creativity and analytical insight, our approach helps clients overcome both external and internal barriers and achieve profitable growth.

Typical projects include the following:

• Identifying breakthrough opportunities by revealing the intersection of key megatrends and company capabilities

• Redesigning and optimizing a new product-development process and organization

• Developing a future research-and-development strategy and aligning the organization around it

• Assessing the current portfolio and reallocating resources to ensure the company meets growth targets by business, geography, and time horizon

In many cases, growth opportunities can be pursued through an existing business model, but sometimes a different model is likely to provide a greater advantage. In these latter cases, BCG’s business-model-innovation capability can also play an important role in helping a client accelerate its growth trajectory.